Learning Analytics Data Sharing – LADS14 Workshop</h3>
Many applications of learning analytics require large scale data for educational data mining techniques. Although the data from an institutional learning platform or a MOOC may be considered large, the scale and coverage of such datasets are insufficient to allow the potential of learning analytics to be fully realised. This challenge applies to both learning science research and to potential products and services built around data generated during learning activities. To move beyond inefficient ad-hoc bilateral institutional arrangements with limited returns is not a trivial undertaking. The technical possibilities for data sharing range from a fully-specified centralised shared repository to a highly decentralised approach based around a paradigm such as Linked Data and an appropriate choice of data licence. The practical feasibility of data sharing for learning analytics is, however, a great deal more complex than the selection of a good technical architecture for data sharing and it is imperative that initiatives intended to work towards a data sharing platform ­ comprising technical, operational, business, policy, and governance factors ­ have a better basis on evidence than has so far been established and related to the problem at hand. The intention of this workshop is to gain contributions of evidence (both project successes and limitations), contextualised to learning analytics data sharing, and to critically assess the feasibility of various options with a view to developing a roadmap for action by multiple stakeholders. The roadmap is intended to be a bridge between research and practical action and encompass the multiple concerns indicated above: technical, operational, business, policy, and governance.
Organizers:

Adam Cooper, University of Bolton, UK

Tore Hoel, Oslo and Akershus University College, NO

Hendrik Drachsler, Open University Nederlands, NL

Empowering Teachers as Designers of Learning Experiences Utilising Social-Mobile Technologies (SoMoLearn)</h3>
We are all familiar with the image of students obsessively using their mobile to check Facebook, update Twitter, and share images on Instagram. Such practices are typically seen as disruptive to learning, and thus these media – or even the mobile devices themselves – are often banned from educational spaces. Yet at a closer look, these are perhaps disruptive learning practices – not disruption to learning. Students are using social and mobile media to share their experiences, reflect on their own and their peers’ experiences, and together construct meanings from them.
Niall Winters eloquently argued recently (Winters, 2013) – the benefits of new media are not manifesting themselves in educational systems, mainly because most attempts to promote them are bypassing the primary agents of change in any educational system: teachers.
Accordingly, the core question of this workshop is how to empower teachers to recruit mobile technologies and social media as an ally in their work with students. Teachers need to develop online professionalism, media literacy skills and knowledge about how to use these new media for teaching, and how to sensitize students with regard to potentialities, ethics and risks. These are the themes that will be explored through the lens of learning design, teacher inquiry, participatory design and professional development.
Organizers:

The workshop papers will be probably published later in an open access journal.

Workshop on SMART CITY LEARNING: opportunities and challenges</h3>
Smart Cities promise to preserve and improve the wellbeing of society, exploiting information and communication technology (ICT) as an infrastructural backbone to influence and improve key factors like mobility, environment, people, quality of life and governance. Going beyond top-down popular functionalist approaches a new vision driven by a 'person centered in place' design approach is emerging:
a) The interaction process with the environment is moving from the metaphor “being able to use” towards the metaphor “actively influence”; digital consumers are going to transform into “digital enactive” producing an increasingly amount of data that actively contributes to the re-definition of places and spaces;
b) Learning is going to transform into a life long process for knowledge, skill, and expertise acquisition and, additionally, for strengthening peoples meta-cognition abilities, which are related to a genuine self-regulation in order to consciously determine its trajectory within the new techno-ecosystems;
c) A new set of personal and interpersonal skills is required to avoid possible new "divides" and to allow to adequately developing the above mentioned processes in people and in society.
d) The representation and usage of the main sources of knowledge has to change to enable new forms of learning. The traditional medial representation, e.g. book (i.e. unit of text) or film (i.e. unit of audio-video material), will have to act as a seed for a new open structure which will be customizable and will provide the access to data that is available everywhere, but might be subject of permanent extension and change.
Organizers:

Paloma Diaz Perez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Monica Divitini, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norwey

Carlo Giovannella, Univ. of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy

Marco Kalz, Open University, The Netherlands

Alke Martens, University of Rostock, Germany

Workshop on Creative Mobile Learning and Teaching (CMLT14)

The 3rd Workshop on Creative Mobile Learning and Teaching #CMLT14 focuses on innovative uses of mobile and wearable technologies to support creativity in learning and teaching, i.e. teaching and learning how to be creative as well as teaching and learning through creative practice. We invite students, educators, instructional designers, researchers, practitioners and developers to share and create innovative, creative mobile learning applications, concepts and scenarios. Creativity is becoming the new value and norm for a modern society and is vital to our survival, crucial for scientific innovation, social, cultural and economic progress. Already today many of the fastest-growing jobs and emerging industries rely on creative capacity, such as the ability to think unconventionally, inventing new scenarios and producing novel solutions. How can new technologies, including mobile and wearable technologies, be designed and applied to enhance creative learning and teaching? Which innovative pedagogical approaches to using mobile and wearable technologies can foster creativity in learning and teaching? As there is a gap between creative mobile pedagogies and innovative mobile technologies, it is important to bring both sides together to embed creativity into the TEL agenda. The key question emerging is how mobile and wearable technologies can be designed and applied to enhance creative mobile learning and teaching in academic, scientific, work-based, social or everyday settings. This workshop focuses on identifying innovative approaches, practices, designs and developments harnessing the potential of mobile and wearable technologies to enhance creative learning and teaching.

Motivational and affective aspects are frequently neglected in Technology Enhanced Learning although they are one of the most important factors when it comes to acceptance and success of TEL solutions. This becomes even more important as we move towards more open, independent, and informal learning settings. Furthermore, using technology to learn how to cope with motivational or affective issues is increasingly attracting interest.

Currently, several disciplines have discovered the importance of the motivational and affective perspective, but little progress has been made in systematically integrating them into the design of technology enhanced learning solutions. This workshop therefore aims at (i) integrating the multi-disciplinary research activities, (ii) discussing practical experiences, and (iii) transforming them into systematic engineering methods. In previous editions of the MATEL workshop series, a pattern-based approach has been identified as a promising way of aggregating the different results.

In addition to providing a forum for discussing results and challenges faced, the organizers also aim to find a way to seed the development of a pattern collection as a community activity.

4th Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology-Enhanced Learning

Enhancing /awareness/ of learners and other participants involved in education processes by technology means augmenting formal or informal learning experiences, typically in real-time, with information on progress, presence, outcomes, workspace, and the like.
Paired with support for /reflection/, i.e. the art and craft of creative sense-making of the past, this bears huge potential for improving the learning and training experience with respect to utility, self-regulation, usability, and user experience.
This 4th ARTEL workshop brings together researchers and industry from different backgrounds to discuss and advance support of awareness and reflection for learning. This year’s workshop will run under the headline ‘application in practice’, additionally emphasising feasibility and sustainability aspects in education and work.
Organizers:

Workshop Learning Analytics for and in serious games

Over the last decade, serious games have become accepted educational tools and the idea of using the great strength of modern computer games for educational purposes experienced a significant boost. From an educational perspective, computer games offer a promising approach to make learning more engaging, satisfying, and probably more effective. However, playing experience and learning motivation are fragile assets; to be enjoyable, a computer game must be balanced well, meaning the game must match an individual player¹s playing preferences, playing styles, and playing capabilities in a suitable way in order to too one-sided gameplay. An appropriate adaptation is of crucial importance in order to reach and maintain fun and enjoyment on the one hand and effective, successful learning on the other hand. The starting point of an educationally suitable adaptation and good game-balancing is to equip the game with and understanding of the learning domain, aspects and characteristics of the player and, in particular, an understanding about what is going on in the game, for example, motivational states or learning performance. Thus, seamless user performance assessment is a major research topic. It is not a trivial to assess and interpret activity data coming from the game in an unobtrusive manner in order not to harm the gaming experience and perhaps Œflow¹ and requires intelligent technologies. A recent trend in educational technology is educational data mining (EDM) and learning analytics (LA). The fundamental idea of learning analytics is not new, in essence, the aim is using as much information about learners as possible to understand the meaning of the data in terms of the learners¹ strengths, abilities, knowledge, weakness, learning progress, attitudes, and social networks with the final goal of providing the best and most appropriate personalized support. At this point educational adaptation, game balancing, seamless assessment and EDM/LA meet. New educational technologies leverage the potential of serious games and increase their educational depth. The workshop is organized around and out of 2 European projects, the GALA Network of Excellence (www.galanoe.eu<http://www.galanoe.eu>) and the ICT project LEA¹s BOX (www.leas-box.eu<http://www.leas-box.eu>). The goal of the workshop is bringing together different research disciplines, technological approaches as well as practitioners in order to discuss this broad conceptual area from a broad range of perspective.

Learning through Video Creation and Sharing

This workshop intends to bring together the research communities of Video-based Learning, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and Social Networks in Education. Within the scope of the educational use of videos we aim to explore synergies with CSCL and learning communities based on social networks. Videos have been used as teaching resources during years. They can be valuable educational resources. In fact, several platforms supporting video-based learning have emerged in recent years. Video-based environments provoke the students’ curiosity, promote their creativity and increase their motivation. In addition, the students’ role has evolved from a passive approach ("students as spectators") to a more active approach ("students as creators") in the last years. From a CSCL point of view we may raise the question if collaborative video creation can improve students’ learning experiences.

Social networks can be used to connect and engage learners in a friendly community environment guided by sociocultural learning theories. However, which social and interactional aspects are particularly relevant to make should collaboration in video based learning environments successful? The aim of this workshop is to shed light on these emerging questions, exploring ways in which these new learning techniques can be incorporated to classrooms, identifying educational effects and ways how to measure and analyze these.

Can MOOCs save Europe's unemployed youth?

The EC’s Digital Agenda for Europe recently launched the Startup Europe MOOCs project, which aims to accelerate web entrepreneurship in Europe by encouraging the use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focused on web design and development skills. This is done through a combination of two activities: firstly, a scoping study to chart the landscape in terms of demand and supply and secondly, a network of universities and business schools in Europe interested in developing MOOCs for web talent. The purpose of this workshop is to critically examine the assumptions behind this initiative and to review its initial findings. Some of the questions we will explore are:

What are the gaps between demand from entrepreneurs seeking qualified personnel and young Europeans seeking employment, and the supply from institutions providing MOOCs?

What are the benefits and costs of providing a MOOC for web skills? Can we identify sustainable business models?

What are the factors that providers need to consider before engaging in such a project?

How can providers enhance the quality of their MOOCs, and how can they maximise registration and retention?

Supporting Innovation in Technology Enhanced Learning

Innovative practices in the use of technologies for learning (especially in non-formal and informal learning environments) are often not sufficiently considered by research whereas bottom-up innovation is playing an increasingly important role in the field of TEL, which might lead to new theories for learning. On the other hand, there is a need to verify the impact of existing learning theories on TEL practices to determine whether this has led/is leading to innovation. Furthermore, the lack of an holistic approach in TEL as described above puts at risk the effectiveness and mainstreaming of new ways of using ICT for learning purposes: too often the timespan between the identification of technologies that have a potential for learning, the theoretical analysis of pedagogical implications, the piloting of such technologies and their adoption (first at small scale and then mainstreamed) is so long that the technology itself becomes out-dated compared to the changing environment and learning needs.

The HOTEL project (Holistic Approach to TEL), a support action of the 7th FP, is addressing the above issues and challenges by designing, testing, improving and proposing new ways to support innovators through the HOTEL Innovation Support Model.

The definition of the model has taken place thanks to the work carried out by the HOTEL exploratorium labs, real testbed settings where innovations in the field of TEL have been concretely supported in the fields of higher education, workplace learning and informal learning in professional networks.

The workshop will share with participants the experience of the Labs and present the HOTEL innovation support model. participants will be actively engaged in the discussion on the relevance and suitability of such a model in the field of TEL.

Teachers should spend their time on supporting their students, not on using complex educational technologies! Still, teachers must benefit from smart technologies! In view of the technology lean classrooms we are facing today, the need for increasingly directing attention on the 21st century skills and formative assessment and feedback seems to be a mere vision.

In the context of the Next-Tell (www.next-tell.eu) project, leading educational and technological organizations developed solution for the constraints and context conditions in the European schools today. These efforts manifest in 5 distinct packages that include novel software components and methodologies that address a broad spectrum of every day’s school life.

In this tutorial, the project will present the packages, highlight potential benefits and demonstrate tools and methods.

nextTrack: Is a package that allows activity and performance tracking with simple mobile technologies (such as tablet computers) and in most simple and quick forms. The package also offers analyses features and modules to visualize and communicate the outcomes of learning analytics: next-tell.eu/resources/tools/nexttrack/

nextTALK: this package provides a turn-key solution for deploying PFT in classrooms. It supports all the steps needed to gain basic knowledge about team facilitation and provides an environment for refining facilitation competencies over time by reflective practice: next-tell.eu/resources/tools/nexttalk/

nextPRACTICE: is a package that supports individual teacher-lead inquiries into students learning and to share findings; it allows to (i) plan, and track your inquiry, (ii) share findings with colleagues, (iii), build a research library directly relevant to your learners and your school, and (iv) play an active role in the strategic plans of your workplace: next-tell.eu/resources/tools/nextpractice/

next GRID: This package includes methods and software that are intended to help teachers who have been inspired by their class or colleagues; who want to explore what and how their students thinks about a particular topic; who want to share their exercise with colleagues in an easy and accessible way; and who want to know how to work with interactive visualizations and dashboards of their students’ learning data: next-tell.eu/resources/tools/nextgrid/

Organizers:

Michael D. Kickmeier-Rust (TU Graz)

Peter Reimann (University of Sydney)

and the entire Next-Tell team

Workshop on Open Data for Education & Learning: The basics and more (OD4edu) (cancelled)</h3>
The LinkedUp Project is a FP7 Support Action which pushes forward the exploitation and adoption of public, open data available on the Web, in particular by educational organisations and institutions. This workshop will be directed at members of the education community seeking an introduction to open data and Linked Data and will provide some examples for how they can be used to enhance education and learning resources. The focus will be mostly on the non-functional aspects needed for planning and decision-making for open data projects for education such as: availability, discoverability and reliability of open data resources, as well as licensing and privacy and trust issues related to the re-use of open data. A significant portion of this workshop will be dedicated to assisting educators on how to identify projects and ideas that could take advantage of open data; how to find open data, and how best to evaluate Linked Data and open data that will meet the needs of a specific project-work or learning scenario.
Organizers: